A slew of French news sites, including the popular Le Monde and Le Parisien, are protesting the use of ad blockers this week. Le Monde is displaying a splash screen that asks users to turn them off, while L'Equipe and Le Parisien are blocking access entirely until users disable ad blockers.

"For our 400 journalists to provide you each day with high-quality, reliable, and varied news each day...we must be able to rely on advertising revenue," Jerome Fenoglio, the editor-in-chief of Le Monde, wrote in a message to users who are running ad-blocker software, according to The Guardian.

While ad-blocking software is becoming more popular around the world, it's particularly popular in France, where an estimated one-third of French Internet users have installed it, according to research firm Ipsos.

Blocking ads effectively limits a media company's revenue, which is often based on the number of people who actually see those ads. They argue that their content must be paid for in some way, and if they can't run ads, they may be forced to ask users to pay for content.

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That said, there appears to be a growing interest in blocking ads. Whether a blackout is the best tack to avoid ad blocking remains to be seen. But as history has shown, Internet users don't typically respond well to being strong-armed into doing something. And being forced to view ads may be particularly unappetizing.

Earlier this month, Opera announced that the developer version of its browser now includes native ad-blocking technology; no extensions or plug-ins needed. Once enabled (via a simple on-off button), the ad-blocking feature can speed website load times by as much as 90 percent, according to Opera, which also said its solution provides a 45 percent faster browsing experience than third-party ad-blockers.

All the recent talk about ad blockers, meanwhile, really got started when Apple added support for them in iOS 9.

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